IN THE WRITER’S WORLD | Porn

12Jun08

The Porn of Porn
by Perry Brass

Last month I was in a panel discussion at New York’s LGBT Community Center in Greenwich Village on “The Literature of Porn.” The panel came about through an online relationship I had developed with Michael Lucas. Lucas was born in Russia of a Russian-Jewish background, immigrated to Western Europe (notably Italy), then on to New York, where in 1998 he started Lucas Entertainment — a company that now produces an impressive number of high quality gay porn movies, some with and some without Michael.

What’s fascinating about Michael is that he’s not only a handsome and beautifully proportioned young man, but he is also very bright and, at times, outrageously opinionated and quite capable of stirring up controversy. So much so that he decided to drop off the panel (which was meant to seriously discuss pornography) three weeks before. All because he’s now involved with yet another controversy: he’s boycotting the Center. At least for the time being.

But what I love about Michael is that he’s brought a rare injection of glamour into the sleazy and predictable world of queer porn. Personally, I feel he’s a megastar among a whole panoply of men like him—the kind I refer to in my book How to Survive Your Own Gay Life—as “holy tricks”: those deliciously raw examples of malehood who drive you, express, through the elevating heat of great sex. As I put it in my talk:

One of the things I want to bring out is the holiness, the nobility of porn, especially for queer men. I want to talk about why we are crazy about porn, why we write it, why it sells, and what keeps it up and going.

Beginnings

I started writing porn (or “sexually explicit fiction”) while I was recognized as a poet. In fact, I started to feel that poetry and porn had a lot in common, in that they were both direct forms of communication; they often relied upon orally satisfying effects (all puns intended); they tended towards compression of expression (in and out quick, and you do the job as fast as you can); but they also reserve spaces for artistry, decoration of language, and (for me) the need for an emotional payoff.

It was as if he was floating on a bed of dreams and sex itself, and I was guiding him, touching him everyplace. . . and I would push him along on this coast of wild, half-dreaming sex, until—

That’s a brief quote from my book Works & Other Smoky George Stories, a book of porn stories I published back in 1993, that posited the interesting question: what happens when a poet writes pornography? To begin with, of course, it’s good to begin with what is porn?

Pornography comes from an old Greek word that means “the writing of harlots.” Which is great, because it means that professional sex workers (like Michael Lucas) should be producing it. Or at least people who have enough detachment from the “moral” aspects of sex to make it exciting. Porn, to put it slick: gets you off. Or at least very hot and bothered and in the mood for sex or masturbation.

I wanted to think of porn as real reality writing, that is, “action” writing at its best. Just as writers like the ever-popular Louis L’Amour put one “knock-‘em-sock-‘em” fistfight in every chapter, porn also has an emphasis on pure action, and the question still is how to keep the action from going stale, from becoming too repetitive, and still have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

So, when I started writing gay porn back in late 70s and early 80s (though I had first written straight porn), I decided to do three things:

1. Use all the dirty words that people adore but don’t like to say in public, but also make the dirty words sound intimate and sensitive. I hate vulgarity in pornography, just as much as I hate it everyplace else.
2. Treat sex like it were just another physical activity, without blushing about it. (Back to the Louis L’Amour discipline of keeping the action going; good porn writers can learn a lot from Western novelists or other storytellers.)
3. Make sex a part of a story—an important part—but not the only part. (And, sometimes, not even the most important part.) I liked my stories to have wonderful endings, with genuine emotional payoffs, which, I guess, differentiated them from a lot of other often drearily banal porn. OK, I admit, like in any other art forms (music, architecture, cooking,) there’s a lot of garbage out there, and I did not want to add to it with my own work. I also did not want my “porn” to end up in the more gelded and fashionable bin of “erotica.”

The great, late porn writer John Preston, of Mr. Benson fame, put it more succinctly: “Erotica is the rich man’s porn.”

Uptown It’s Erotica, Downtown It’s Porn

After decades of writing both erotica and porn (erotica when I got paid more for it; porn when I did it for my own satisfaction among other things), I decided that porn—and by this I mean gay porn, although maybe, at this point, most storytelling porn of any stripe—comes out of three main, great story lines. These same story lines are constantly used in gay lit, and probably in other forms of literature as well. But in gay lit, I see them repeated endlessly —whether they are in queer porn stories, movies, comic books, even storytelling pictures such as Tom of Finland’s august work.

What follows are the three basic story lines of gay porn, which you see all the time—although in movie porn you may miss them for one basic reason: in literary porn, you’re writing about real sex; in video porn, you are seeing real sex. (It should be noted that straight porn often shares these story lines, as in the famous “Debby Does” series.

1. What I like to call the “Secret Sharer” storyline, taken from a great short story by Joseph Conrad, whom I refer to as the Mother Lode of Porn Stories, only that Conrad just never put the sex in his work, such as The Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim—both lapping with sexual situations that never get consummated. In the “Secret Sharer” storyline, two men are thrown together in a secret, clandestine way that puts them outside the “normal” activities of society: they can be stowaway shipmates, cell mates, two horny lonely travelers out in the world, spies, war buddies—anytime two men are thrown together in a situation where the “normal” people have no idea what they’re doing and they realize at some point a very sudden intimacy . . . anyway, an extremely hot set up has been provided through this storyline. The question is: at what point in their secrecy will things become combustible? This gives the “Secret Sharer” storyline its wonderful flexibility and usefulness.
2. The Boys-on-the-Island storyline. In this line, our secret sharers are part of a party of like-minded guys, and they are all cast away from the censorship of the mainland and the mainstream. The island can be Fire Island, Madagascar, or Manhattan—but they are away from the squares and no holds will be barred. Boys-on-the-Island stories have captivated men (and boys) forever. When I was a kid my favorite of this sort was Treasure Island, but there were also the Robin Hood stories set in the depths of Sherwood Forest, which I used in my time travel novel Angel Lust. As a form of fantasy, what queer youth has not dreamed about a place where he and guys like him can be free to explore whatever they wish, without the repressive factors of parents, schoolyard bullies, and other such miscreant spoilers
3. The Hamletian Prince. He is the central figure who discovers that he is different, and his difference bothers him until he figures out how to express it sexually. This story line is the core of most “coming out” stories (as well as innumerable religious myths and “histories”—Abraham realizing he’s a Jew; David realizing he’s meant to be king). Gay porn, in fact, is often about coming out—in one way or another: either coming out as queer, or just coming out as sexual, coming out as S & M, coming out as a “bear,” or even a vampire. It always figures that the hero has a secret inside him. And it bothers him. But he may also have a virginal “pure” quality that others recognize and he wants to preserve. This is the set up for stories about umpteen “twinks” in the bad world of “big” adult men. The “twink” protests that he’s not “bad,” and it will take him a while to see that having sex with other men is not bad either.

The first two story lines are repeated constantly in gay literature as a whole, and porn in particular whether written or visual. The third line is more literary but you can always find it in porn, although it’s presence may be a bit more subtle.

Because in video/movie porn you are seeing real sex, it uses three other elements that bring other dimensions to this form of expression:

Location, Casting, and Mood

The location of a porn movie or story can become a character in itself. Like prisons—where the “Secret Sharer” story line, the Boys-on-the-Island line, and the Hamletian Prince can easily merge; military locations; classical or mythical locations; and some work locations—like a gym, school, an office after hours, or a hot monastery—that easily transgress into rich, incendiary sex.

Casting. OK, we all like to see hot men in porn, and it is one of the main crits of porn that it plays on and even establishes these stereotypes. My feeling, however, is that porn (in any form) can also push stereotypes around. Given the right kind of attitude, especially in literary porn, you can really extend boundaries of what is hot and “porn-able.” A good example is a story I published in Advocate Men back in the late 80s called “The Cold.” It takes place in a remote cabin in the Adirondacks during a winter storm—it’s very much a “Secret Sharer” story line. One of the two guys stranded on a dark, snowy night is an amputee. He has lost a leg in a hunting accident, and is able to hide it until it’s time to get his clothes off. At that point, his disability actually increases the heat in the story—something that really rocked Advocate Men at the time. The brave editor who bought the story said that several early readers in his office thought “The Cold” was “sick” to have a sex story with an amputee in it. But it certainly opened up the way for other stories like it, and I have learned that amputee sex lines have found them their way into scores of kinky porn tales.

My own feeling is that this kind of story could only have appeared, at the time, in a porno setting. None of tres chic gay “li’trary” magazines of the moment were going to publish anything like it; they were still stuck on stories about sensitive young men and their troubles with their mothers. So, “casting” in porn can be more transgressive, or rule breaking, than in a lot of other literary or cinema settings, where the gay casting often goes the gamut from style queens to guppies. My friend the writer Samuel Delany also pushes the envelope, “casting” his own porny stories involving homeless men of every race and body type, inflammatory sex in odd situations (sometimes in public settings), and a general no-holds-barred, high-action attitude.

Mood. A lot of porn movies are simply about mood. The mood is tense, hot, hyper excited—so you end up with what I call “abstract porn.” That is, one sex scene after another, a veritable ballet of sexual positions and techniques—that can be focused on keeping the mood going. This is rare in literary porn, although in flash fiction—very short fiction—you can get away with it. However, the idea of Sex for Sex’s sake has made real inroads in literary writing, as witness Erica Jong’s famous invention of the “zipless fuck” in Fear of Flying. Of course gay men have been enjoying zipless fucks for ages, but it took a white straight woman to make it talk-show cool.

For many people, gay literature of any type is still porn. You see this in libraries that refuse to stock gay books unless they are of a very clinical or (deballed) literary nature; in preachers Bible-thumping; and in reviewers who won’t look at books that they feel are too “gay.” In a way, this has allowed porn itself to remain amazingly “pure” in that it exists without pandering to critics or p.c. censors, without having to be anything except exciting and tasty, instead of tasteful. For this reason, porn is actually now being studied by a number of scholars who see it as a much more real depiction of queer men and their feelings than most of the work that got into the commercial hopper in the last 60 years.

We can see ourselves and what we want, what expresses our deepest fantasies and desires in porn, rather than in the blander books that are now coming out by the droves from publishers. But what all of this only makes me desire is simply to see much better porn.

In the Writer’s World runs every last Thursday (May/June schedule change)

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